Enhancing High-School Students' Computational Thinking with Educational Robotics Learning

Abstract

In recent years, engineering education has become one of the challenging issues in Thailand education. By teaching and learning subjects independently, students are limited to subject-oriented problems, which are not in reality. To address these flaws, integrating knowledge across disciplines becomes significantly necessary. In the past years, STEM has been accepted as one of the effective strategies to bridge the difference in nature of each field to construct more practical projects and innovations. Moreover, the educational robot can be employed as a learning tool in that strategy since it not only provides challenging learning missions but also promotes computational thinking for the students. Therefore, this research study proposed STEM learning activities on three-day workshop to lay out the foundation to the high-school science-and-technology students who are becoming the engineering students. The workshop comprises of eight phases to facilitate their learning inquiry process with hands-on experience; moreover, the activities were designed in consideration of promoting computational thinking with challenging learning missions. The findings of this study showed that the proposed workshop activities are beneficial for the students who outperformed on robotics with higher computational thinking; meanwhile, they could provide more relevant responses regarding the proposed learning activities.